Mambo Taxi

At the moment I'm:

feeling well-exercised. It turns out to be 13km round-trip from work, up to the local BBQ place, and home again. Dinner was a totally awesome shrimp poboy.

I"m slightly worried about roverthedog - she got an abscess next to her ear, and the vet gave us a fairly substantial set of drugs to deal with everything, including an ear infection. She's been wearing her Cone of Shame for a few days, though we trimmed it down so it's slightly less awkward. The cut is doing much better now than it was on the weekend, though, so I'm only feeling slightly anxious about how she's doing. She's a trooper, and she seems in good spirits (she even enjoys being pilled. What a cooperative dog!)

Really looking forward to the weekend- melted_snowball and I are off to Ithaca on Friday! Wegmans! And Viva Taqueria! And Quakers! Oh my!

A big regret is that we can't take Rover- we had been planning to, but it makes the most sense to kennel her at the vet's. It would be a tougher decision if 1) they didn't love her as much as they do, and 2) she didn't love staying there as much as SHE does.

I'm starting to feel nervous about the Quaker workshop I'm co-leading next weekend in Toronto. I will spend a bit of prep-time between now and then, and I am sure everything will go fine, and now having done this before, I can answer the question of "why the hell did I think this was a good idea?" - because during, and afterward, it is totally rewarding. It's just the before that's a bit anxiety-inducing. :)

I'm grateful for all of the people who spoke up at the Regional Council meetings these last two days, concerning light rail. If you read this, you know who you are- you rock. And I'm also grateful for the people who've been live-tweeting the council presentations. I am cautiously optimistic, though I think the next few weeks are going to feel more nerve-wracking to me than the federal elections were...

I'm frustrated that I got half-way through a book and it got auto-returned on me. I checked it out online, via the local library; it was good for 14 days and there was a hold on it. (Though really I don't know how many holds there are- so who knows when I can check it out again.) While I did take notes on the parts I had read, I'm not sure how easily I'll be able to reconnect with it whenever I can wrest it back again. ...Ironically given my inability to finish, it is Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, about focusing one's attention on the things that matter to you. More words to come, I hope.

And speaking of Rapt, I was reading it over the unRapt long Weekend, which included celebrating Queen Vicky's birthday, my birthday, very few raptures, amarylliss visiting us from Toronto, and a few people over to watch Left Behind and Left Below.

And on that note, I think I'm Left for Bed. Night!

[sorry about the extra return characters in these posts; they don't appear on the ipod, even editing the entry, so I can't fix it until i'm at a computer. Anyway! Moving onward!]

Tuesday 17:47- I'm on the ICE train back to Göttingen from Kassel, which won't give me enough time to finish this entry. It took me an hour to make the trip in the other direction, with 4 stops in 50 km. This way will be 17 minutes. Zoom! [goobermunch, does that answer your question about 1.5 lightspeed? ;]

[back at the hotel] I'm fairly damp; it rained all day. I saw a wonderful science tool museum with clockworks from the 17th century, astrolabes, telephones from the turn of the last century, and suchlike, started as a collection by a local baron/scientist. My favorite exhibit was an ornate "astronomical clock" with faces for all seven planets, each with hands for where on the compass the planet would rise and set.

Kassel is regionally known as the site of a 5-yearly modern arts festival, which sounded like its permanent exhibits would have been neat to see, alas they were too far, or closed, or I failed to find them. I did a lot of wandering streets and photographing old buildings though.
I think I spent too much time wandering before I finally got on the tram for Wilhelmshöhe, a large park featuring two castles and a giant statue of Hercules. The closer larger castle, an ornate half-circle shape on top of a hill, containing a decent art museum, closed just as I got there.

It was icy and foggy; I barely could make out the other two sights through the fog.

The park felt like a fairy tale- train tracks through snow in a forest, castles through the mist on a hill... Inviting lights turning into will-of-the-whisps and turning off as soon as I approached... I did have fun overall, despite bad timing.

In the evening we went to a party thrown by a student in dan's host's group who just got a job in eastern Germany. So his advisor brought him lots of east-german techno.

I wish I had any conversational German; it felt weird being monolingual around so many multilingual people. German cultural note #n of many: my slice of chicken and broccoli pizza had a heavy cream sauce instead of cheese. It was tasty, but it reminded me of last night's dinner.

Lufthansa pilots are/were on strike. Hopefully the flight backlogs will be cleared up by my first return leg Sunday (Berlin to Frankfurt).

Wednesday 15:45- I'm in a coffee shop in Goslar, home of Rammelsburg mines, a museum and UNESCO heritage site. And a very spooky museum it was- underground, dripping water, nobody else around, spotlighted rusty equipment amidst the shadows. Perhaps creepiest- water dripping in a few exhibit cases. I took a huge number of photos. There were headphones with an English audio guide, which sounded like it had been written by fine arts students imitating German grammar. And yet, I have no reason to think it was poor translation. I couldn't figure out how to make a recording of any of it, but I was laughing out loud a few times. One notable clip was from the perspective of a piece of basalt. "I have been crushed and folded by the inexorable forces of millennia..."

But! There was an exhibit on a Christo project, called "Package on a Hunt", which involved an ore hopper wrapped in fabric and pushed around by Christo and Jean-Claude outside the mine in 1988.

There was another piece of art, near the entry, with ghostly miner outfits suspended from the (far above) ceiling by chains. I was not so fond.

The interpretive history exhibit feels like it can be summed up: "1000 years ago, they found copper here. Ore trading made this a powerful city for many hundred years, but it was to valuable to barons and princes so it was also invaded frequently, destroying each settlement in turn. Now we have a creepy museum instead."

English guided tours were only by advance arrangement, so I didn't do the "ride in an ore hopper" tour or the "wear a helmet and walk around the mine for an hour." Just as well, as I did find lots to see in Goslar (including tons of very old German houses, as Goslar wasn't bombed during the war at all.) I caught a bus that got me back to the train station, and a bit of food, then on the regional train to Hannover in ok time.

I'm feeling fairly worn out, and considered just going back to the hotel, but I think I can have ~45 minutes in what my guide book says is an excellent modern art museum.

18:23- well that was exciting. I just had the equivalent of a visitor to... Well, somewhere 100km from some big city...
Bleh, metaphor fail. Anyway, I had a rapid walking tour of Hannover. Museum didn't work out for me; it was too far and routing was confoosing. But I did find the essential sights to walk past, including Liebniz's house (ugh, too ornate) and nearby, a church that was turned into a WW2 monument in its bombed out condition, including a bell connected with Hiroshima. The opera house and old city hall are beautiful, as is... (I'm not yet sure which building it is, but it looked like a glass confection with cubes piled in odd not-quite-stable-looking arrangements. I'm sure I'll figure it out tomorrow.)

I hopped on a medium-fast train, which is to say 200kph, getting me back to the hotel before dan. Can I just say, if I could get to Toronto in 35 minutes by train, I would be such a happy boy? Of course, also, the fast trains are a huge money sink; I believe from The Economist they have been deemed "a mistake", but I'd like to see how it plays out over the next decades. I wonder if, like building more roads, they mostly invite more travel and more frequent trains?...

23:00- dinner with dan's host and colleagues; i'm quite socialed out. Good folks, just too much talking for me.

Thursday, 11:00- this evening we're off to Berlin. Today is a quiet day, I think. I considered another trip to Hannover, but I'd rather rest up. It's rainy again.

15:53- hah. Rest? I spent most of the day wandering Göttingen, once the rain stopped.
I found the farmer's market (on Tuesday I was looking in the wrong part of Marktstraße) and had cheese and pastry. There was a Catholic church with optical illusions on the columns, a not-so-exciting modern exhibit in Old Town Hall, and the outside of a number of places including the house where Gauß worked, Bismark's house and a tower somehow related to him (?) but it's for rent? *shrug* And a babbling brook. I probably should have rested more, but I guess there is the 2+ hr train to Berlin this evening.

Overall I'm having a good time; I have seen a lot that made me smile. It's too bad more tourist things are closed, but that's what I get for visiting in the off season. I wish my ipod came with wireless so I could sometimes figure out where the heck I am or what it is I'm looking at. Maybe I should have rented a gps or something. Or if the wikitravel app wasn't so bad- it caches pages, but only for a short while, so all my Germany info went "poof" before the trip started. And finally, there is the DeutcheBahn app- which is immensely useful if I have wifi, and utterly useless without. For such a well-designed app, it was a rude discovery I didn't have a copy of the tour items I had thought I stored.

Things I've decided:

A flash drive is a stupid way to move 500mb of data from one machine to another, if the source computer only has USB1 and it's transmitting MUCH slower than that (something like 1mb per minute, tops). ..But, given that putting the second computer on the fixed network was too much of a pain, it's the only reasonable answer I had in this situation. Ah well.

A Greyhound bus to Toronto is a stupid way to get a signature authenticated, but since the only allowable authentication agents are US Notary Publics, and it couldn't wait until the next time I was in the US, I did it. Ah well. It certainly wasn't cheap- $23 ticket, $30 US notary public at the US Consulate, and it'll be something like $10 to mail the piece of riveted-and-embossed papers back. You want a story? Ok, here's a story.

The US Consulate is a strange place. It's so secure you can't bring in a backpack, briefcase, or anything electronic into the building. My morning went like this:

Go to the bus station at 8, queue for a ticket, queue for the bus, get on 8:30 bus, take a short nap, discover we're taking highways I don't recognize, decide they're the 407, go back to my book, get into Toronto at 10:20, put my briefcase/cell-phone/ipod into a locker, walk a few blocks to the back door of the consulate, tell them I need something notarized, go through the metal-detector, watch them radio ahead that someone (me) is going to the third floor, pass through no less than three security checkpoints, pass a large room with mostly-nonwhite people getting visas, have people with guns open doors for me, press my own elevator-up button, not see any security cameras in the elevator, get off at the third floor, get totally confused because I'm in a room full of Mennonite families, find the reception desk at the far end of the room (no signs), spend a while watching Mennonites watch the weird city folk, get my paperwork paid for and notarized and signed (she had a nice pen), go out the door at 10:50 only passing one security guard, waste an hour of the morning because of the 2-hour gap in busses back home, not buy clothes, not buy DVDs, buy an Alfred Bester book I've been looking for, buy a veggie dog and fries in front of City Hall, eat lunch, get on the 12:30 bus, not nap even though I really wanted to, and get home at 2.

Then, half a day of work, which fortunately seems to be finishing up right about now. :)

Google Labs' Transit has great potential; for the regions already covered, it looks like just the ticket.

The specs don't look so complicated; I wonder how much it would cost to import our local transit system.

According to the Google Group, Toronto's given Google their complete transit info, and may become another test-bed.